Category Archives: sector

The industry is moving toward 4k-sectored hard disk drives - a bit late though but better late then newer. However, in the interim period where compatibility for 4k sector drives is not widespread, drives such as WD's EARS series are using internal translation to present themselves as 512-byte sector drives, leading to unexpectedly horrible write performance. As a band-aid I'm proposing an almost trivial patch to glabel which allows it to have a "forced sector size" specified and as a result can present 4k sectors to the file system even if the physical drive doesn't. See also: glabel.

The industry is moving toward 4k-sectored hard disk drives - a bit late though but better late then newer. However, in the interim period where compatibility for 4k sector drives is not widespread, drives such as WD's EARS series are using internal translation to present themselves as 512-byte sector drives, leading to unexpectedly horrible write performance. As a band-aid I'm proposing an almost trivial patch to glabel which allows it to have a "forced sector size" specified and as a result can present 4k sectors to the file system even if the physical drive doesn't. See also: glabel.